... claims as the ostensible causus belli. Reality though, returned to haunt the crippled Bush administration with a vengeance. And if Bush and Cheney (and Tony Blair) had remained true to the last in cheerleading Israel's chaotic reinvasion of Lebanon of August 2006, plans for the most ambitious Israeli pre-emption yet – the mooted air assault on Iran of June 2008 (16) – were quashed as being 'extremely stressful' for US forces.(17) But it may have been a close-run thing. In December 2005 US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) announced that a new Joint Functional Component Command for Space and Global Strike met requirements necessary to declare an initial operational capability ...

... on 4 March 2009 Will-iam Dalrymple wrote: 'Eight years of neocon foreign policies have been a spectacular disaster for American interests in the Islamic world, leading to the advance of Hamas and Hezboll-ah, the wreckage of Iraq, with more than two million external refugees and the ethnic cleansing of its Christian population, the rise of Iran as a major regional power, and now the implosion of Afghanistan and Pakistan, prob-ably the most dangerous develop-ment of all. ' But for whom has this been a disaster? Or for which interests? All manner of people within the US have done very nicely out of the trashing of Iraq. Billions of dollars ...

... the wake of 9/11 but tracing it back to its roots in the Carter administration's support for Afghan resistance to the Soviet invas-ion. The simple point, that the US and Britain now find themselves just as mired in that country as the Russians did three decades ago, barely needs to be stated. That the architects of Iran Contra, an earlier alliance of 'creative destruction', in the brilliant terms of neo-con apparatchick Michael Ledeen, should be setting the agenda for the second President Bush came as no surprise; that there was such a continuum through the Clinton years per-haps should. Depending now on a Sunni 'arc of moderation' has simply ...

... Gaitskell's ally at the US embassy and in an active retirement from the diplomatic service continued to influence British politicians through his work at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. One son Roy, a close friend of CIA chief William Casey, continued in a similar line of work with British trade unionists, while also having a hand in the Iran-Contra affair. Other son Dean, whose journalistic career at The Daily Telegraph prospered mightily under Conrad Black after serving as a defence assistant in the Reagan Administration, wrote a biography of David Trimble, and is now research director of the Policy Exchange. In that capacity Godson fronted its 2007 publication of The Hijacking of British Islam. ...

... Lobster 47 et seq), has just been returned to power and now has alongside him the virulently anti-Arab Avigdor Lieberman. For the moment the recession and the election of Barack Obama seem to have punctured the efforts of Netanyahu to use the 'war on terror' mindset and network that took us into Iraq into launching a war upon Iran. But if he succeeds in that effort, we will see whether the Community Security Trust and the Board of Deputies of British Jews again report a rise in antisemitism. I read these books after hearing Sir Gerald Kaufman in the Commons denounce Israeli attacks on Gaza. He described the murder of his Polish grandmother by a German soldier and ...

... Al-Ani, was the trial for treason that same year, of dozens of members of the Ba'athist party, with 22 ultimately executed. After the party massacre, 'no one dared to question any-thing. This meant that the regime of Saddam Hussein acquired infallibility through fear and silence. ' (p . 50) War with Iran was Saddam Hussein's second mistake. Egged on by the West, both sides prodigiously expended blood and treasure. Peace in 1988 was closely followed by widespread circulation of one of those strange books that mysteriously transform the global political atmosphere. Written under a pseudonym by an Iraqi architect who had spent much of his life outside the country, The ...

... Khan network was the result. In an almost ironic turn to current world events, when Pakistan finally mastered the bomb in 1986/7 , it was then able to make use of the network to pump know-how and materials back out as assiduously and covertly as they had been pumped in. And it was during the 1980s that Iran was making its greatest efforts to master the technology, with (covert) Pakistani assistance. Despite knowledge of these interactions, Washington decided not to excoriate its erstwhile cold war ally. Yet in 1993/4 the network was able to sell centrifuges to the Iranian regime. Meetings between representatives of both sides in the deal continued through 1996 ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 55) Summer 2008 Last | Contents | Next Issue 55 Cock-up, conspiracy, or both? Israel and the Clash of Civilisations Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East Jonathan Cook London: Pluto Books, 2008, £14.99, p/b Was the invasion of Iraq a disastrous cock-up by the Americans and British, and by the Pentagon in particular? There certainly is a long line of people from within or close to the British and American states asserting this in various forms in the ongoing blame game. To give just a few examples: ...

... Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the first generation critics of the Warren Report Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act, and, Desmond Fernandes, The Kurdish and Armenian Genocides Mark Phythian, The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006 Mark Purdey, Animal Pharm Jonathan Cook, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the plan to remake the Middle East Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the global nuclear weapons conspiracy David Miller and William Dinan, A Century of Spin: how public relations became the cutting edge of corporate power Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945- ...

... , but the long term cost of making the next use of that power only viable in terms of total war. From being a cautious ally of the superpower, supporting it even when it was wrong, the UK became complicit in a strategy that could only be used on terms that must now result in the mass murder of civilians. Iran has now become the case study. The Iranian revolutionary right has crushed the liberal opposition precisely because it is associated with the West, confrontation is growing between the US and Iran not only in Iraq but in the Levant, and the US faces defeat by a thousand cuts or making a preemptive and unlawful strike which our current administration would ...